


how can i resist (when it feels like this)

by disturbiing



Category: Hunger Games - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-02 14:40:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19200940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disturbiing/pseuds/disturbiing
Summary: “You don’t forget the face of a person who was your last hope.”





	how can i resist (when it feels like this)

The morning air is cool and sharp against his skin as his throws out his arm, tossing meal to the geese that peck at his ankles. He doesn’t even look at them. He only sees the girl concealed by a glass window 10 yards from his own. She is beautiful, she is poised, she is dead. Before his eyes flash Maysilee, Thresh, even little Rue, and she seems to fit right in with them. Her eyes train on some insignificant spot across the room. The girl on fire has been extinguished.

“Fuck!” He looks down at his pierced ankle, a halted stream of blood crawling down his bare feet. A neglected goose honks at him. He glares back, “I could kill you, kid.” The goose just turns and waddles away jauntily. No one respects him anymore.

He dumps the rest of the meal on the ground and starts back up the porch steps to his door. But he can’t help but look at her one more time. And he can’t help but follow it with a swig of his bottle.

The past year has been exhausting. Having nothing to do, (though much preferable to war, endless deaths, and so much stress his precious sandy locks threaten to thin) seems to give him much more of a reason to look for solace in the bottom of a bottle. During 74, he had hope that he could save someone, save her. 75, he had hope that he could kill the system that made him reach for something that burned anyway. And the restraint of 13 kept him locked from a bottle, and that’s when he had the most hope. Triumph, he found did not give him a feeling of victory. No, triumph didn’t take away his nightmares. Triumph didn’t reverse every murder he committed. Triumph didn’t bring anyone back to life.

It was almost as bad as losing the war. When hope dies, when there is nothing left to want, there is only nightmares. And the bottom of a bottle.

And yet, he can’t bring himself to dip fully into the sea of alcohol. He keeps his head afloat. He still hopes for something. And though that something isn’t as grand as a world revolution, or the deaths of those who made him this man— and therefore unable to drag him to any kind of definition of sobriety, it is a small sliver of yearning. Of want. Of hope.

He knows that love is supposedly bigger than revolutions or life or death. Star-crossed lovers and all that crap. But he knows better than to love that much. He has his priorities, priorities that were burned into him two weeks after he became a victor, when everyone died, including the girl with the blonde hair and the grey seam eyes.

The girl he guiltily realizes he hasn’t thought about, drank about, screamed about in too long. It might be because there have been too many people to torture himself about recently, and the cycle is getting longer. Or it might be the girl with the same seam eyes, however dead they are now.

That girl gives him hope. When Greasy Sae tells him that the only person she responds to is him, even if it is only to nod. When she places her shaky pallid hands over his when he updates her about Panem, or Gale, or Peeta. When she knocks on his door far past midnight, the only time she seems alive anymore, with tears streaming down her face and ragged and hoarse gasps of “It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault.” looking for solace in his shaky arms.

It seems wrong to love someone like her, too frail to live on their own, to sustain themselves. Someone so defenseless to his own dirty self. But he remembers her when she was sixteen, and too old for her age, taking her sisters place in assured death. And he remembers her defiantly screaming at a camera, pain so potent in her words you can see it. And he remembers that she is not a defenseless child, but a broken soul like himself. He is a broken man. She is a fallen bird.

He pours himself a cup of coffee and watches the sunset. Peeta loved the sunset. He imagines Peeta now, under a dose of morphine, trying to make her a good person again. He wishes his coffee was clear and alcohol as he slams his eyelids down and remembers that Peeta’s starved body and drug pumped mind is his fault. His fault, his fault, his fault. So he throws his mug to his right and faintly hears the breaking of the ceramic as her blindly grabs a bottle of liquor.

She comes that night in just a long robe, shaking like a leaf in the cold November wind. Her cheeks are dry but her eyes are bigger than the moon. She calls out his name in little whispers. Each feels like a dagger to his heart. He waits for her to ask him to help her sleep because he doesn’t want to be the next person in a line of five million that have used her.

And his arms are around her, and she sobs into the crook of his shoulder, and he reassures her that everything is fine now, she stares up at him with her big doe eyes and asks, “Where’s Prim?” And he can’t respond, and she cries out, “No. No. No.” And he knows he is helpless. 

When the golden sunrise peeks over the ruins of District 12, her eyelids begin to flutter shut and she mumbles almost imperceptibly, so quiet that he almost isn’t able to hear.

“Haymitch, you’re all I have left.

And just, like that, she ignites hope in his blood again, coursing through every vein. 

“Same goes for me, Sweetheart.”


End file.
